La Tour
by lotuskasumi
Summary: From a prompt on Tumblr: "Love is illogical, it means nothing to me." 12/Clara! (Whouffle/Twelve x Clara). T for suggestive content.


"Love is illogical," the Doctor said, positively spitting the words as he paced up and down the length of Clara's room. "It means nothing to me."

Clara, who had not said a single word on the subject, much less a word at all since he arrived in the TARDIS (which was currently parked in the corner near her closet) peered at him over the top of a heavily annotated, dog-eared copy of _Venus in Furs. _She let her arched eyebrows talk for her.

The Doctor noticed her expression. What's more, he addressed it. "What is it? What's with that look?"

"I _don't_ have a look," Clara said, turning a page and keeping her eyes moving slowly across the words that had come nothing more than indistinct blurs since his arrival. But as long as she _looked _occupied, perhaps she could be. She could at least try.

"You have a very distinct look on right now. It makes your eyebrows and nose go all funny," the Doctor persisted.

"_If_ I have a look," Clara said calmly, flattening the book on her lap with her hands until the spine crackled, like the joints of a sore back coming loose. "It's a look of surprise. Because you're talking to yourself."

"I always talk to myself."

"Yes, you do." A pointed look and a little bit of silence weren't enough to stop the Doctor. Not this one, at any rate.

"So why are you always surprised? Perpetual shock can't be good for your heart, you've only got one of those."

"The health of my organs aside," Clara said, folding her hands on her lap and swinging her legs off the side of her bed, the clunky heels dragging against the floor and drawing his eyes to their slow, pendulous swings, "I don't know why you'd choose _that_ subject of all things to talk about. I didn't mention it. I didn't say anything about it."

"I know you didn't."

"So why are you?"

"Got eyes, don't I?" He asked, pointing two fingers at them before they narrowed into one and focused on the book in Clara's lap. "I can see what you're reading."

"Have you read it?" she asked, unable to hide the surprise from forcing its way across her whole expression.

"'_Above all else, I am a dilettante at life.'_"

Clara's mouth fell open and shut in a wordless trap. "... Right. Of course you are."

The Doctor closed his eyes wearily. "It's a quote, Clara. A quote from that wretched thing." He threw another glance at the book as he paced, the front of his suit coat fluttering open, drawing her eyes down to its seams and bright, garish red fabric. She noticed the trousers too, but kept her eyes politely pointed downward whenever he glanced her way, as if to check on the state of her attention.

"I've never read it before," she admitted, slipping her fingers onto the place she last left off before closing the book with her other hand.

"Then why is it so bent and beaten up? You do that to all your books."

"I suppose someone else got to it before me and knocked it into shape," Clara said.

There was another pause. Another look. Another silence that, this time, Clara was meant to take meaning from. She drew in a long, steadying breath and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror standing opposite her bed. Her face had gone paler, her lips tighter, but there was a flush drawing further up her neck that the Doctor was sure to notice, and perhaps remember its appearances in days gone by. _He remembers who he was and what he – we – did. He has to remember _that_, too._

"Where'd you get it?" he asked, his hands in his pockets, his pacing resumed.

So it was polite conversation, then. She could manage this. Clara shrugged. "A little shop down the street. Most of my books are from there."

"Why not get a new one? Why get one that's tattered and been passed around? D'you know what sort of people are drawn to books like that?"

"Not like you to judge, Doctor."

"I'm not judging, I'm commenting. I can make a comment, can't I?"

In response, Clara flipped the cover open and freed her other hand, flicking to the dedication page and to the note penned in there. "People like this?" she asked, looking up to make sure she had the Doctor's attention. She did – his eyes were on her and his head turned with every pass he made to keep her in his sight. Such a strange thing, this focus of his. She used it as a means of courage to read aloud the words that had enchanted her from the moment she saw the book – and were really the only reason she _bought_ the thing, if she could be honest with herself. "'_Now at last, my dearest heart, will you know me not for a clever woman, but a woman well-read. Do you recognize the vow?_ "You have a curious way of arousing one's imagination, stimulating all one's nerves, and making one's pulses beat faster. You put an aureole on vice, provided only if it is honest. Your ideal is a daring courtesan of genius. Oh, you are the kind of man who will corrupt a woman to her very last fiber." _I am yours everlasting – Milla.'_"

The Doctor shook his head before Clara was finished reading. His eyes were off of her and his smile was bitter. "Precisely what I mean. Illogical. Ridiculous."

Clara crossed her legs at the ankles and began to tap her heel against the floor. That caught his eye in a lingering, daring glance. This made her brave. "But isn't that the point, Doctor?" she asked, narrowing her gaze and studying him hard.

"The point of what?"

She persisted, feeling safe in the subject at last. Just as long as he kept eying her askance and pretended not to be, Clara knew she could talk about nothing of consequence and gain the conversation's upper hand. "The point of love. No logic, no reason, no pattern at all – just the heart, and all it's got inside, ready to give to whoever deserves it."

"Yes, but who _decides_ that? Was there a committee? A little get together discussion that no one else was invited to? A Parliament of Fools?"

Clara mimed a yawn and held the book up to her mouth, letting out a little sigh.

"Oh, sorry," the Doctor said, in a tone that was far from an absolute apology, "Am I boring you, Miss Oswald?"

She pretended to nod wearily, sighing again. "Your dramatic over-protesting bores me."

"This isn't dramatic."

"It's still protesting."

"It's _complaining_. I get to do that, you know. I can get away with all sorts of little spleen venting now."

"I'm sure you can."

"You don't believe me."

"I do believe you, Doctor. That's why I'm yawning." Clara shook her head and leaned backwards on the bed, opening the book again and holding it up to block out the ceiling, the scattered golden pattern of light, and all the cracks she'd been meaning to paint over, but never quite found the time to conceal. She was learning to love those little flaws though she could hardly justify their existence whenever the rent was due. It was easier to talk with the Doctor blocked out like this – easier to talk in a way that showed more of her heart than she knew what to do with, or would once feel comfortable bearing. He had a way of drawing it out of her, all this bitter, true words and thoughts and awful, wretched looks that she would have kept under close wraps had he been anyone else. _But he's not. He's no one else but himself, and I'm not half as bothered by that as I should be._

_Sometimes, _she amended hastily._Only sometimes._

"Tired of what I have to say?" he asked.

"Only when you go on like this," Clara said, resuming her spot on the page and becoming awfully, suddenly aware of how close his footsteps had come since his earlier pacing. It was harder to read when she noticed that. "I didn't ask for your opinion, Doctor. I didn't ask for your thoughts at all, actually. You arrived unannounced and started moaning on _to _me, without me ever saying you could."

"I know you didn't."

"And yet you moan."

"Because you listen to me – and what's more, you respond," he said, and something in his tone made Clara lower the book and raise her head so she could meet his eyes. He was standing at the foot of her bed, just to the side of where she half-sat and half-lay reclined. "Do you not like it when I talk to you, Clara?" he asked.

"That would depend entirely on the conversation," she said, noticing that all but the first button of his coat had come undone, revealing more of the outfit she'd eyed appreciatively in their first true moments alone, back on the first day in his TARDIS. Clara's neck burned hot again. "And the tone. And the person involved."

"So you'd rather be talking to another person," he said, sitting on the edge of the bed, so close to and yet so far from Clara. If she bent her knee at just such an angle, she could touch him. She dared herself not to, and willed herself to do it all in the same silent breath. "Is that it? I'm right, aren't I?"

"You're only _half _right," Clara allowed. "I'd never let anyone get away with talking to me the way you can talk to me, when your mouth runs away from your brain and gets itself in all sorts of sour little moods – and I let _you _do it because_... because_ you're... you. Whoever that is. Whatever that means."

"Exactly my point. _Again_. Illogical. Irrational. Ridiculous." And yet he was smiling as he said this, and there was a heat in his tone that was not anger or rage in the slightest, but a passion of another kind. It was one Clara recognized as surely as he had eyes for the flush on her neck and the memories of all its earlier appearances. Similar topics had been discussed in those times, and similar positions had been taken as the ones they were in now. Clara tried not to think of them. She thought about nothing else as the Doctor undid the last button on his coat and turned, one hand on her knee, moving up her leg, while the other reached out to pry the book from her cold, still hands.

"'_Love knows no virtue, no merit," _he said, quoting again, the way a student reads a line for the praise of his doting teacher._ "__It loves and forgives and tolerates everything because it must.'"_

Clara recognized those words from the page she had just abandoned. "'_We are not guided by reason,'_" she said, finishing the quote and offering him a smile just before he descended to give her a warm, slow kiss.


End file.
